joyful pregnancy, her fun-filled weekend in the Swiss Alps with a European prince who was twenty years her senior. “How do they get those pictures?” she asked as she and the Moose studied a photo of Isobel on the high Tibetan plateau, arm-in-arm with a movie star she’d never met and didn’t recognize.
The heads of programming from every major cable news channel called with escalating numbers, some of which stood up handsomely against the print offers pouring in. They were encouraged no doubt by their edgy producers and highly stressed news directors. ABC and NBC let it be known that no cable outfit could make an offer that they would not match and exceed. CBS, hard-pressed to pay its ancient news performers whose packages reflected seniority and therefore weighed the network down, was forced to abstain from the frenzy.
Mysteriously, or so it seemed to many after the fact, no one in authority gave any thought to the notion that Isobel Gitlin might jump ship. She was not a contract employee. She worked at the pleasure of management; people departed at management’s pleasure. Thus it had always been and would always be. A New York Times senior vice president’s wife raised the subject at dinner one evening and was rebuked. In front of others, her husband told her, “People do not leave the New York Times. The New York Times is where they come to be !”
Isobel finally agreed to appear somewhere. She decided on 60 Minutes. She chose it because CBS never offered her a penny, not even a job. In a world gone crazy, she judged CBS to be the last refuge of sanity. They told her Ed Bradley would tape the conversation at Isobel’s apartment three days before the broadcast. She looked forward to the experience. The network promoted her all week. It seemed that every break had a promo promising “ Isobel Gitlin, only on 60 Minutes, this Sunday, after football.” These messages promised the “whole story” plus “exclusive revelations.”
“My God,” she told Mel Gold, “is this my fifteen minutes? When will it end?” He only smiled. He’d already told her it was too late.
“You never know,” he said. “Woodward and Bernstein got thirty years out of theirs.”
By Thursday, she’d just about mastered the stutter, partly by learning to make the camera an ally. The awareness of its harmlessness to her worked like an umbrella in hand on a threatening day; more often than not it kept the clouds away. In her mind the camera became a machine intended to help her focus. She also had come to understand that the defect itself, the stutter, loomed large in her legend. “Oh my,” she thought, “do I really have a legend?” Before the cameras rolled she asked Mr. Bradley if it was true that, as she’d heard, some producers at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC had lost their jobs for failing to book her.
He told her it was possible. “This business eats people for lunch,” he added.
That Sunday’s 60 Minutes show got its best ratings of the season. For CBS, it was one of the few times they didn’t lose audience after football. Nonetheless, Ed Bradley’s interview was not what he expected. At first, Isobel gave him no new information. She talked at length about things she’d already written about. Bradley’s frustration surfaced when he came to understand that Isobel was skillfully holding back anything not already public knowledge. The blockbuster news he hoped for, expected, been told he was going to get, was nowhere on the horizon. What’s more, she demonstrated devilish mastery of the process, especially in view of her reputed inexperience. Isobel had the infuriating knack of sounding as though she was offering new, exciting facts while revealing nothing. Eventually, her inquisitor threw up both hands and said, “Stop the tape.” He glared with undisguised anger at Isobel.
“Something wrong?” she asked. A production assistant brought her bottled water. A makeup man worked on her forehead.
“Yes.” He was trying, gentlemanlike, to take the edge off his voice. “I’m not getting anything here.”
“What is it you want?” Isobel asked.
“A b-blockbuster’s what we expected. Something new and exciting.” She thought that it was absolutely odd that her own voice was strong as steel while he tripped on the always dangerous b. “Something we don’t already know. I thought we were going to get into this. In all fairness, that’s what we were led to expect.”
“I see,” she said, returning the water. “Something… b-big. I think I have it now. Get the tape ready and ask me how I feel about Leonard Martin and then about my future.”
“Okay!” He yelled at the crew, and they bustled.
Bradley was all ease and purpose again, speckled beard glowing in the meticulous lighting. “Tell me, if you can, what do you think of this guy? How do you feel about Leonard Martin?”
Isobel said, “When I was a child, in France, my grandmother told me about a neighbor. During the war the Germans occupied the neighbor’s house. They threw him out-him and his wife and his children-into the barn. They made them servants of the Nazis. The man’s wife and both small children died that winter from disease and hunger and despair. When the war ended, my grandmother’s neighbor reclaimed his home. Many years later, she told me- forty years or more-a man came and knocked on the door. He was an older man, a German, traveling with a young boy. He was one of the German officers who had occupied this man’s house. I suppose he wanted to show his grandson where he had been during the war. Well, when the neighbor recognized the German, b-both of them old men by now, he reached behind the door, got the shotgun he’d kept there for decades, and killed the German right there on his doorstep, in front of the man’s grandson.” Isobel paused to take a deep breath. Ed Bradley gave her one of his practiced looks; the one that asks, “What does that mean?”
Isobel said, “Leonard Martin sees himself as that neighbor.”
“Do you?” Bradley asked.
“Do you?”
Bradley was speechless. It was a great look, and Isobel wondered how long it took him to perfect it. Then he said, “This has been quite a ride for you. I mean personally. What does all this mean for Isobel Gitlin? You’ve got a wonderful future ahead of you. So, what are your plans?”
Isobel’s answer, as disclosed to the world on that Sunday evening, sent a wickedly rapturous rush through the breast of the wife of a certain New York Times senior vice president. Few people outside the business would care, but a Richter scale for the global media culture would have surely shuddered and shattered when Isobel said, “I have no contract with the paper I’m with now. [She didn’t even call it by its name!] Who knows, I might like to return to London.”
“Back to England. Back home? Have you thought about that?”
“Yes, I have. There are so many things I’d like to do. I’m not married to the newspaper, you know. [Once more she failed to identify the New York Times. The New York Times!] I feel an obligation to the unfinished obituaries of Christopher Hopman, Billy MacNeal, Floyd Ochs, and Pat Grath. Leonard Martin is really part of that. I started these stories, and until I’ve finished them I cannot walk away. You see that, don’t you? But I’ve no desire to be celebrated, famous, or turned into a journalist with a capital J. ”
Ed Bradley’s face registered no expression at all. But for his unchanged posture he might have been pole- axed. Isobel Gitlin, a woman on the very edge of media stardom, fame, and riches-the crowning achievement of American culture-had just said she wanted no part of it.
“You just want to go back to writing obituaries?” Bradley asked.
She addressed herself to the friendly camera. “People die every day, don’t they. The stories I write are the stories of their lives, and I would hope I do it in a way that’s both interesting to the reader and respectful of the subject. I believe obituaries are a noble part of this country’s freedom of the press. I continue to strive to live up to the standard set by Robert McG. Thomas.”
She was careful not to say “our country.” She was, after all, a proud Fijian, carrying a British passport.
“You’re leaving the Times?” asked Bradley, having quickly refitted the smile that helped make him rich and famous. “You can’t be serious about going back to… to writing obituaries. You’ve got big stories ahead, no? Books maybe. And you’re thinking of leaving the New York Times? Leaving the newspaper business altogether? Going back to England?”
“I might,” she said, light as a feather, and smiled right into the camera.
Watching the show at home in the Whitestone section of Queens, bourbon and soda in one hand, giant salted pretzel in the other, Mel Gold let out a grunt of epic proportions. His wife hurried in from the kitchen, fearing it was something to do with his health.
“Sonofabitch!” said the Moose, unable to wipe the smile from his face.
St. John
